I’m not a violent person. I do a lot of tough talking, and I have a habit of utterly dismembering people when they piss me off (I have a history in this area that’s undeniable). In the last few days, however, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that popping Robert Scoble right across the bridge of his nose would do wonders for my sanity.

Now, I should preface this by saying I’m actually a fan of Robert’s. I do enjoy his videos and I’ve been introduced to some great Web 2.0 stuff because of him. He’s a very good canary in the mine of Web 2.0 and always has his ear on the railroad tracks ready to move on to the next great shiny thing. In other words, an alpha-geek. In the last week, however, he’s aggravated me to the point where I’ve dropped him from Twitter and Facebook and couldn’t care less what he has to say, at least for now and the foreseeable future.

Last week he did something so insanely stupid that I had to take a step back, soak it all in, and try to believe it all because I couldn’t believe he even did it. Without rehashing that which has been rehashed over and over again and again, Scoble used a script on his Facebook account to scrape the names, e-mail addresses, and birthdates of his 5,000 followers on Facebook. Buy itself, that wouldn’t raise any red flags, right? And if Facebook decided they were within their rights to ban him on the spot, who could argue with that either?

That’s not the way things work in the brave new Web 2.0 world, though. In this case, Robert used a script provided to him by a company called Plaxo.

Who is Plaxo?

If you don’t know who Plaxo is, you were probably asleep through the early part of the 2000’s. Plaxo finagled its way onto lots of systems with the promise of keeping your address book automatically in sync with people’s changes. If I was a Plaxo user and changed my e-mail info, your address book would update automatically. All this sounded good to a lot of people who installed the app, only to find out that the business plan also included Plaxo spreading virally by spamming the address book of people who had it installed. On top of that, people became concerned at the sheer volume of data that Plaxo had sitting in its databases, and the service utterly collapsed.

Recently, the company had an epiphany, and with the introduction of the Open Social initiative, a conglomerate of companies in the social networking space focused on data sharing and open borders digitally. Conspicuous by its absence from this coalition is Facebook. Plaxo, however, took that opportunity to introduce Plaxo Pulse, a product that promised to do what Plaxo did for address books in 2004 to social networks in 2008.

So what’s with the fisticuffs?

Basically, Robert keeps missing the point over and over again. There are a lot of people that are seriously pissed off at him right now, and justifiably so.

Here’s a quote from Judi Sohn that really summarizes the problem with what Scoble did beautifully.

Robert Scoble valued his relationship with Plaxo more than he valued his relationship with his “friends,” otherwise he would have posted to them what he was doing with an experimental, alpha-quality and untested script before he did it…or he wouldn’t have done it at all.

So why does Plaxo scare me?

Because it’s a matter of trust, and I don’t trust them. Fine, you say, don’t give them any data. Oh, but that’s the scary part…it’s not my choice.

Right this minute, Plaxo probably knows your email address, your phone number, and where you work. You may have never visited their site, but if you’re online and with their how many million members there’s a good chance that someone who has you in their address book with accurate data has shared that information with Plaxo.

This is what Robert doesn’t seem to understand, and this is why I feel the need to punch him in the face. In doing so, I would hope to be rattling his brain back into place so he understands just why what he did was wrong.

Robert has contended that people shouldn’t have a problem with him doing this because it’s the same as people taking the data and entering it into their Outlook address book or their G-Mail address book. He’s also repeatedly called the reaction excessive and even has one of the Plaxo guys sitting in his comments and telling everyone that Plaxo is a nice company now. Really. Finally, he had the audacity to claim that he’s not doing anything with the data, that it’s living in a private account, and that he never had any intention to use it. He even went as far as saying he did this to “prove a point,” presumably about how Facebook’s data isn’t portable.

Let’s address these issues.

Who has the right to my data?

This is one of the central questions in the debate, so let’s address it first. Robert claims that sliding my e-mail address into Plaxo’s network is no different than putting my e-mail into his mail client or G-Mail address book. As far as I’m concerned this is the most asinine thing he’s said during the whole debate.

While it’s true that I may or may not have a problem with my data being plugged into Google’s servers, it’s your mail client, and I’m willing to accept that my address may end up in a mail client with a company I don’t particularly care for (mind you, this is all theoretical; I love Google and use every one of their products daily) since you’re free to use the information I’m sharing with you to get in touch with me.

But to say that giving the data to Plaxo is the same thing is simply stupid. Plaxo has a history of abusing customer data. You can tell me how much they’ve changed and how they’ve learned their lesson, but in the end Plaxo is a scumbag company with a scumbag history that wouldn’t even be around had it not been for the data they mined 3-4 years ago from unsuspecting user accounts. Anyone who knows the name Plaxo (except for Scoble, apparently) isn’t comfortable with them holding any personal data of theirs which is why this whole thing got started to begin with.

Robert got in bed with slime and woke up looking slimy.

But is it really my data?

Absolutely it’s my data, and absolutely I have a right to say what’s done with it.

To a point.

But Robert, of course, takes that to a whole new level and in trying to defend himself makes the ridiculous assertion that we need “Friend DRM”…

What if I wrote down Judi’s email and then manually put it into my Outlook’s contact database. Wouldn’t that have been exactly the same thing that I tried to do with Plaxo’s script?

Second, if you add me as a friend I assume you want me to send you emails and interact with you. But, it’s clear that some of you didn’t really want me to do that when you added me as a friend. Maybe we need DRM for friends.

No, stupid, because doing that doesn’t involve Plaxo. I’m sure he sat there and made that stupid laugh he makes in all of his videos as he wrote that. “I got her!” he thought, completely missing the point. There comes a time when you’re so sucked into every shiny new gadget and service that you can no longer objectively comment on any of them. I think Robert has hit that point.

He also makes another strawman point:

So, to Judi, why is it OK for Facebook to import all my Gmail email addresses? Why aren’t you screaming bloody murder about THAT? After all, did anyone on Gmail approve me to import their email addresses to Facebook?

[snip]

Is Plaxo a social monster for trying to import? That’s for you to decide, but why weren’t you all up in arms when Facebook imported your data and your friends email addresses from Gmail?

Again, it’s not the same thing for two reasons. 1: You can choose not to do it, and 2: Facebook isn’t storing your imported data for people you don’t connect with on their service.

Punching Robert in the face.

So the other day, after watching him continuously miss the point like some kid with really thick glasses on a little league field misses a baseball, I got angry and posted on Twitter that Robert’s latest post on his blog made me want to punch him in the face. The web is nothing if not efficient…

You might be thinking that this was a bit of hyperbole on my part, and of course it was. I don’t think I would ever punch Robert in the face. I still like him even if he is completely clueless about what exactly was wrong with what he did here, but what made me want to punch him in the face is the fact that despite a large chunk of people telling him what he did was wrong, and how they didn’t like it, he insisted that everyone else was wrong and what he did was no big deal.

I’m not one to succumb to crowds and have a popular opinion just to avoid controversy. Any long-time reader on this blog knows I love shredding people. Yesterday, on SRD Radio, I absolutely demolished Michael Crook’s idiotic argument that soldiers are getting rich off their military salary and made him look completely stupid in the process (you can hear that here; it’s toward the middle of the show). I’m not one to back down just because my opinion isn’t popular or because it faces strong objections or reactions.

That being said, sometimes you do have to know when to apologize, suck it up, and shut up. I’ve done that too. Just because you think you’re right doesn’t mean you are, and in this case Robert thinking he’s right is utterly meaningless because most of the feedback he’s gotten that I’ve been able to see has been negative. Whether or not you think you’re wrong, that means you might want to apologize, particularly to people who you call “friends.” If friendship to you means that I give you my data and you can do what you want with it because we’re “friends,” then it works the other way too and when you hurt your friends or disappoint them, you also have an obligation to man up and apologize to them rather than making excuses. Even though you don’t think you did anything wrong, lots of people apparently do.

One last thought

Data portability isn’t really the issue here. Do I like that my data lives and dies with Facebook? Not particularly, no. That being said, I’m not losing any sleep over it either. This issue was never about data portability, though. It’s been about who Robert chose to share his “friends’” data with since the minute it came out that the reason Facebook canned him was for a script he was running that was authored by Plaxo. You can spin it anyway you want, and you can turn yourself into a martyr for data portability if that makes you feel better and, in your mind, justifies what you did, but we all know the truth.

You screwed up. You gave people’s data to a company they don’t like and or trust and a company that has a history of abusing customer data. For that, you owe the community, the people you call friends, an apology.

Stop justifying and rationalizing and start apologizing.

Photo courtesy of Will Pate via Flickr.